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Christ turns with an athlete’s torso, arm raised; Mary curls beside him, already done pleading. The gesture starts four hundred figures moving.

When Michelangelo unveiled the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in 1541, a quarter century after finishing the ceiling above it, the objection arrived before the praise. The pope's own master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, declared that so many nudes twisting through the air belonged in a bathhouse or a tavern, not the chapel of Christendom. Michelangelo answered in fresco: he painted Biagio into the bottom corner as Minos, judge of hell, with donkey ears and a serpent applied exactly where the master of ceremonies felt clothing mattered most. When Biagio begged the pope to order it removed, Paul III is said to have replied that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell. The joke held off the century for about 20 years. The Counter-Reformation hardened; Aretino wrote a long public letter of pious blackmail; and in its final session the Council of Trent ruled on sacred images: nothing lascivious, nothing indecorous. In January 1564 the Congregation ordered the Judgment's offending figures covered. Michelangelo was not consulted long: he died that February, at 88, before a brush touched the wall. The work fell to his own student and friend Daniele da Volterra, who spent months painting loincloths and drapery over the anatomies he revered, and in two cases, Saints Catherine and Blaise, chiseled out and repainted whole figures whose arrangement had struck the censors as obscene. Rome gave Daniele the nickname that outlived all his own paintings: Il Braghettone, the breeches-maker. The breeches kept coming for 300 years; later popes added layer after layer until roughly 40 figures wore committee-issue cloth. One ambitious bystander offered a cleaner solution: the young El Greco, in Rome in the 1570s, let it be known he would happily demolish the whole wall and repaint it modest, decent, and no worse painted. Rome declined, and shortly afterward found reasons for El Greco to prosper in Spain. The restorers of 1980 to 1994, scaffolded up against the wall for longer than Michelangelo took to paint it, faced the codified question of which centuries to strip away. The ruling: Daniele's breeches stay, as history; most of the rest could go. So the fresco today is a two-author work, the bodies by Michelangelo, the modesty by his grieving student, and a small painted persuasion campaign by everyone since. Biagio is still in the corner, still wearing his ears. A faithful copy made in 1549, before the censors, hangs in Naples, keeping the original score.